BEIJING - Chinese legal authorities released dissident artist Ai Weiwei on Wednesday after a three-month detention, apparently ending a prosecution that had become a focal point of criticism of China's eroding human rights record.
"I'm released, I'm home, I'm fine," Ai said in English after being reached on his cellphone early Thursday. "In legal terms, I'm -- how do you say? -- on bail. So I cannot give any interviews. But I'm fine."
Photographs of Ai taken as he arrived late Wednesday at his studio showed him smiling and wearing a blue T-shirt. The shirt hung loosely on him, his girth reduced during his time in custody.
The New China News Agency reported that Ai had been freed "because of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from."
But the release of Ai, 54, who is widely known and admired outside of China, appeared to be a rare example in recent years of Beijing bowing to international pressure on human rights.
Ai was the most prominent of hundreds of people detained since China intensified a broad crackdown on critics of the government in February, when anonymous calls for mass protests modeled after the revolutions in the Middle East percolated on the Chinese Internet.
China's move to douse any flicker of dissent was the harshest in years outside of the restive ethnic regions in the far west, and the vast majority of those detained in the crackdown were, like Ai, held in secret locations for weeks with no legal justification.
NEW YORK TIMES
